In China power and religion are intertwined, argues journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao and you cannot understand China without knowing its religion. At the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy, he explains how religion moved from apparently irrelevant to crucial in today’s China. Why religion is not going away, as many intellectuals have thought.Read More →

Startups are mostly at the mercy of quasi-monopolies like Facebook, Google, Tencent or Alibaba. William Bao Bean, managing director of Shanghai-based SOSV tells in this elevator talk how his no.1 accelerator helps them to avoid spending money on those giants to get access to an audience, creating a win-win situation.Read More →

We have seen this before, says financial analyst Victor Shih about the efforts by the financial authorities in China to reduce debts. In 2014 they tried the same, and in 2015, 2016 the PBOC, China’s central bank, started to print money again. When economic growth comes under a certain level, that will happen again, he tells Bloomberg.Read More →

China might have announced drastic reform of its government, state-owned companies are still lagging behind in reforms, argues financial analyst Sara Hsu. Because their access to state funding is unlimited, they keep on creating new debts and have little incentive to improve efficiency, says Sara Hsu at CGTN.Read More →

China veteran and rock star Kaiser Kuo addresses the Confucius Institute at the Webster University at the start of the Year of the dog to talk about his mission as a bridge builder between China and the US. “I figured out what I wanted to do, and my job has been building bridges.”Read More →

Daoism is key to understand today’s China, says journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao. to ABC News. “You can provide values, an escape for people, or turn inward to piety, but you cannot challenge the Government. You can’t be an alternative source of values or the Government will turn against you.”Read More →

A visibly angry Zhang Lijia, author of Lotus: A Novel on prostitution in China, shows that the eviction of migrants in Beijing – described by the insulting term “low-end population – is raising the tensions in China’s capital. “We live in a socialist country,” she fumes at CNN. “They are the unsung heroes of our country.”Read More →

Known as the ultimate consumer guru, business analyst Shaun Rein, author of The War for China’s Wallet: Profiting from the New World Order, now turned to politics in China, he explains at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club. In the past you could make a lot of money, no questions asked, he tells. Now you can still make money, but not that much and you need much more political sensitivity, he says. The pros and cons of Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive.Read More →

Religious persecution in China is high on the political agenda, but most people do not see how the country’s religious revival is going to change our relations in the long run, argues journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.Read More →